Observations on politics, news, culture and humor

Archive for August, 2010

The Country Estate is presently in the process of moving its base of operations from Cincinnati to Seattle. I should arrive on Tuesday and be set up by Wednesday. I will try to do a link aggregation post tomorrow night if I have a decent amount of wifi time, but that’s hardly a good bet with the wifi presence in America’s hinterland.

This drive has already been fascinating. We made it from Cincinnati to Sioux City, IA yesterday and then from Sioux City to Sundance, WY today. We saw Mt. Rushmore today and will see Devil’s Tower tomorrow. This Great Plains part of the country is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s hard to believe people can get by in such a dry, sunny, unforgiving place.

St. Petersburg Times: Russian authorities open a police brutality case against a cop who beat protesters at a peaceful rally. I think it’s great that this guy may face repercussions for what he did, but I doubt he would be facing them if he hadn’t been dumb enough to get caught on tape. Here’s a sample of what this cop did on tape: Video footage distributed widely on the Internet shows the officer, who is seen to be wearing pearl beads on his right wrist and who has a paratroopers tattoo, heading into the crowd shouting “F***ing animals, who else wants some?” A young man is heard asking, “Why are you swearing?” in response to which the policeman seizes him by the hair, hits him across the face with his baton and takes him to the bus. Way to use your words, big boy. Here’s hoping they put you in jail and you get a chance to hang out with some of the criminals you put away. Then we’ll see how tough you are.

Center for a Stateless Society: making the perfectly clear, perfectly right case for getting rid of governmental marriage licensure. Government should have no role in brokering contracts between consenting adult parties. Consider how absurd it would be for guys and girls leaving bars for one-night stands to have to go before a magistrate and take a blood test in order to get a license to have a one-night stand. Or how absurd it would be for government to tell adults what arbitrarily-chosen classes of products they cannot sell to each other or put into their own bodies…well, maybe don’t consider that one, since America is apparently pretty ok with the war on drugs. But marriage licensure is a slam-dunk. There’s no role for government here. Get rid of state marriage licenses and watch the gay marriage issue get solved overnight.

The Independent: Ireland now recruiting fewer priests than England and Wales. Let that sink in–deeply Catholic is signing up fewer new priests than England, a country in which Catholicism was suppressed for years and claimants to the throne still may not marry Catholics. Sure, some of it can be attributed to Ireland’s run of prosperity during its Celtic Tiger years, but a huge part of it originates in the shamefully covered-up child abuse scandal. And still Pope Benedict will not accept the resignations of bishops ashamed of their conduct. “God helps those who help themselves.”

NYT: looking for justice to resolve horrifying cases of post-Katrina violence in New Orleans. This is a pretty sad piece to read–it shows you how quickly people can devolve into my-brute-force-is-stronger-than-yours thugs. The worst part of the whole story: The highest-profile case involving the police is the Danziger Bridge shooting in eastern New Orleans, where six days after Katrina, a group of police officers wielding assault rifles and automatic weapons fired on a group of unarmed civilians, wounding a family of four and killing two, including a teenager and a mentally disabled man. The man, Ronald Madison, 40, was shot in the back with a shotgun and then stomped and kicked as he lay dying, according to court papers. Sweet Jesus, I believe in rehabilitation but I don’t know if there’s enough human left inside the cops who killed Madison to rehabilitate.

Photography is Not a Crime: NH cops confiscate a man’s camera for taking pictures at a crime scene. The best part is that now he may be charged with “impersonating an emergency responder at a fatal car crash.” I don’t particularly want to see crash photos and I would never want to hurt anyone’s privacy by taking them, but I think this guy did have a right to take his photos, or at least the right to not have his camera stolen.

Tired of failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarrassed neocons have accelerated their push to have Iran be the next invasion-point in the war on terror. But hey, war-making fun isn’t just for neocons! Glenn Greenwald hits the Obama administration hard on how the supposedly “serious,” pragmatic guys at the top of Obama’s security team are already treating Yemen as the next theater of operations in the war that never ends.

The lede is delicious:

Could Barack Obama become the first person in history to win the Nobel Peace Prize two consecutive years? It is hard to dispute the premise that awarding him the Prize this year would be every bit as justifiable as last year’s award. Fresh off his Nobel-winning escalation of the war in Afghanistan, we now have this monument to world peace: (various press clippings about drone strikes in Yemen)

I was seething over Obama’s Nobel win last year coming right on the heels of his Afghan escalation, and then he had the audacity to lecture the rest of the world about the necessity of fighting wars in his acceptance speech. This is why you can’t award speculative prizes based on what you hope to get out of someone. We hoped to get an anti-war president who would close Guantanamo Bay out of Obama, and instead we got a wimpy loser who is pushed around by the military and probably will never close Guantanamo Bay. It’s Bush III, but with more college basketball tournament brackets and The View appearances.

One more devastating quote:

The illogic and propaganda driving this is so familiar because it’s what has been driving the American National Security State for the last decade. There is anti-Americanism and radicalism in Yemen; therefore, to solve that problem, we’re going to bomb them more with flying killer robots, because nothing helps reduce anti-American sentiments like slaughtering civilians and dropping cluster bombs from the sky.

Yes, blowback is real. The terrorists don’t hate us for our freedoms. The terrorists hate us because we are occupying their countries, flushing Korans down toilets at due process-free prison camps and dropping bombs on wedding parties. But that answer is too complicated and inconvenient for an American public that loves to be scared and a bunch of death-worshiping politicians who love to scare them.

Read the article. We need more Greenwalds in this country. It’s pretty clear that most Democrats only opposed war some of the time under Bush because Bush was in charge; now that Obama is in charge, it’s perfectly ok to go back to being stooges in the service of the military-industrial complex. And the Republicans don’t appear to be interested in changing horses mid-stream since that could easily give Democrats the first real chance they’ve had at reversing the Republicans’ huge advantage on military and defense issues that probably goes back George McGovern. The war is going to have to be ended by little, insignificant people like us.

Slog: highlighting a ridiculous anti-prop 19/anti-pot legalization ad from California. It’s seriously produced by a group called MarijuanaHarmsFamilies.com. Of course, they throw out the lie that it’s a gateway drug. But the thing that I remember most is the idiotic line that it could be sold at supermarkets!! You mean like prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco and high fructose corn syrup are right now? The sad thing is that crappy ads like this one, with its dramatic, scary drum music, actually work on people who live their lives in fear.

NYT: I’m not going to lie, I didn’t make it past the lede: “The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials.” This just puts him in the elite company of another corrupt Afghan on the CIA payroll, Hamid Karzai’s dope baron brother Ahmed Wali Karzai. There’s really nothing at all surprising about this story, but at least it was written by Dexter Filkins. Just never forget, this is why our troops are dying and killing innocent people in Afghanistan!

NYT: profiling Al Araqib, the Israeli Bedouin village razed again and again to make way for a forest…in the Negev Desert. It’s crap like this that makes it so hard to defend Israel abroad. The Bedouin are maybe the most emphatic members of the Israeli Arab community when it comes to casting their lot with the state of Israel, with some even fighting in the IDF. Maybe it would be better for everyone if the state went ahead and built this forest, but these people have homes there. They have a claim to the land. This seems like a classic “pick your battles” moment and Israel isn’t doing a very good job of picking.

NYT: 21-year-old loser stabs a NYC cabbie for being a Muslim. In fact, let’s not just say stabbed–he tried to slit the guy’s throat. What a great way to prove your superiority to Muslims, by resorting to the sort of tactics that a Muslim radical used to murder Theo van Gogh. This guy just confuses me–he was working for Intersections International, a multicultural group that has advocated for the Park 51 Islamic community center. Hopefully he will have plenty of time to make sense of his confusion in jail.

Via Dan Savage at Slog, Mike Rogers: there were plenty of internet reactions to the news that former RNC chairman and Bush buddy Ken Mehlman came out today, but my favorite was this one. The author’s point is that Mehlman shouldn’t be accepted by the gay community until he apologizes for all the gay bashing he helped make possible under Bush. Of course, Mehlman wanted us to believe in his coming out statement that he advocated for gays behind the scenes, but the evidence doesn’t really support him. I think it’s ridiculous that he is only coming out now when he has nothing to lose, too–he works at a private equity firm, he’s not very famous anymore and lives in a sweet apartment. What better way to get famous again?

NYT: an investigation kicks off into the killing of 8 Afghan civilians and the wounding of 12 more by NATO forces. The dead included two women and a child. I think I have an answer for that emotionally abusive Time magazine cover with the noseless girl and the “What happens if we leave Afghanistan” header–what happens if we leave Afghanistan is that no more blood of innocent Afghans ends up on our hands. How do people support this war anymore? What business do American teenagers have dying on behalf of a corrupt president and his dope baron brother and being put in situations in which they kill innocent people? End the war now.

Photography is not a Crime: Houston police detain a man and impound his camera for taking photos of a TSA checkpoint. God forbid you take a picture of them telling old ladies to take off their shoes and making people remove liquids from their bags. At least this story has given me a good idea for what to do the next time I feel bored. I think it’s gotten to the point that all of us need to take our cameras everywhere and take pictures of everything–test them, force them to back down, force them to recognize our rights.

Der Spiegel Online: an HIV-positive German pop star goes on trial for having unprotected, disclosure-free sex with men, including one who now has HIV. It’s interesting because the defendant is a woman and we usually think of men as being more likely to desire unprotected sex, so there has to be some distinction made between not telling a partner who doesn’t want to use a condom that you have HIV and telling a partner who wants to use condom not to use it and also not disclosing that you have HIV. Oh, and I also wonder how they have any means of proving that the aggrieved man contracted HIV from this singer and not someone else. I don’t know all of the details of this case, but it sounds like it would probably be better handled in civil than criminal court.

The Globe & Mail: addressing the potential sale of Saskatchewan-based Potash Corp., the world’s largest Potash producer. It was private, then got seized by a provincial NDP government in the 1970s, later when private again and now is coveted by an Australian mining company. In the CBC coverage I heard and in this article as well, the primary response seems to be nationalistic whining. Sample some of the stupidity in this article–“Potash belongs to the people of Saskatchewan. They, and they alone, can decide how the material under their province should be exploited, and by whom.”“If there’s one industry in which Canada should be a world leader, with its own multinationals spanning the globe, it’s mining. Take Toronto’s Barrick Gold Corp. out of the equation, and our industry presence worldwide is pathetic, given our domestic attributes.” Being born in Ohio gives me no more entitlement to or veto rights over the sale of the soybeans grown in the northwest corner of the state than being born in Saskatchewan gives some random dude in Regina any claim to potash commodities his province. And then there’s this whole idea of being a world leader. Economic nationalism leads to really dumb decisions like bailing out General Motors. Whoops.

Hong Kong tourist tragedy in the Philippines mega-post: in case you missed it, a disgruntled Filipino cop took a bus full of tourists from Hong Kong hostage and ended up killing eight of them. Let me just begin by saying that this cop deserves to burn in a very warm place for a very long time–don’t use violence to resolve your grievances, especially when it’s violence against people who had absolutely nothing to do with creating your grievance. My favorite piece was in The Globe & Mail, perhaps because it focused on the narrative of the Chinese-Canadian Leung family, which lost three of its five members on the bus. Horrific. The NYT piece is good, too–less narrative, but more time spent looking at potential causes, including a theory that Filipino police stood down in tacit agreement with the disgruntled officer’s grievance. South China Morning Post published this fascinatingly tone-deaf, responsibility-abnegating screed from the Filipino president blaming TV coverage for the failed rescue attempt on the bus. And then for good measure and balance, SCMP replied with an op-ed of its own, squarely placing the blame on the aforementioned Filipino president. I don’t know anything close to all of the details, but I do know that I feel deeply saddened for the eight people who were killed and their families. Violence is awful.

Full coverage returns tomorrow. I had a bit of a heavy schedule tonight and only just finished selecting the day’s best stories now, at 1:15 in the morning. I could probably bang out a links post for you guys, but one thing I’ve noticed is that sleepy blogging is every bit as dangerous as inebriated emailing.

I’ve written whole posts on near-unconscious cruise control, then dashed back to the computer the next morning with no time to spare, just to see if I made any sense the night before. Even when I’ve made sense, these sleepy posts tend to come with at least one horrifying grammatical error–usually some sort of homophone/homonym mix-up. I find that observation interesting in the sense that the same homonyms and homophones that can trouble non-native speakers of English can challenge out-of-it native speakers, too.

So just bear with me till tomorrow morning. Besides, nothing very interesting happened today, except for the release of awful stats on the U.S. housing market and the Hong Kong tourist bus murders in the Philippines.

It’s an interesting time for Islam in America right now. America had seemed able to avoid much of the Islamophobia that has plagued Europe, but 9/11 got the stove lit, the birther opposition to Barack Obama fired things up and now the Park 51 Islamic community center controversy has the heat cranked all the way up. These developments have been highly unfair to the American Muslim community, which, in addition to the baseline rights and courtesies owed to it as well as all law-observing religious and ethnic groups in America, is among the best integrated and/or assimilated Muslim communities in the world and has many highly successful members. There were two Islam-related articles that I found especially poignant and worthy of comment today.

The first was Pat Buchanan’s op-ed on the Park 51 controversy. Pat Buchanan often tricks me because he is such a valuable voice on war and foreign policy and then fires up emotionalist nastiness like this Park 51 piece. He starts off the article by debunking a pro-Park 51 WaPo op-ed which he claims derides opponents of the project as bigots and panderers. How does he debunk the charge? By stating that 61% of Americans don’t support the construction project. Ah yes, because majority opinion determines the definition of bigotry. By this logic, early American slave owners who believed they had the right to hold other humans as property weren’t bigots, either. I don’t think Pat Buchanan would want to defend that position.

From that point, Buchanan begins to build up his positive as against Park 51. In his mind, the WaPo editorial is textbook liberal–too beholden to rationalism, too skeptical towards emotional responses like patriotism. I guess this is the sort of line that appeals to his readers because I would imagine most Americans in this Enlightenment-derived society would want to stand with rationalism. There’s a lot of nice quotes from Burke and Pascal, appeals to our Christian tradition and the treatment of contemporary Christians in the Islamic world. It’s this last appeal that is most upsetting because it comes from the same rhetorical place from whence Newt Gingrich launched his “you can build your mosque when we can build a church in Saudi Arabia” argument. America is not Saudi Arabia, thank God! Why would we want to lower ourselves to the moral level of a country in which morality police once let girls burn alive inside a school rather than escape unveiled and a judge has recently asked hospitals to intentionally paralyze a man?

So if you’re the kind of person who gets misty-eyed reading The Sorrows of Young Werther, maybe you’ll like Buchanan’s emotionalist, culturalist argument. I put a lot of stake in culture, too, but not before fundamental rights. If there’s an American culture, I would like to think it is closer to my position.

The bottom line is that nobody is putting a gun to her head and making her work at Disney. If she wants to wear a hijab but Disney says it is not part of the dress code, then I guess it’s time to either follow their dress code or find an employer with a more amenable one. Imagine if I went and got a job at a coat-and-tie restaurant in New York. They tell me that I’ll have to maintain standards of appearance to keep my job, including no visible piercings. That goes ok for a week, then I go out and get both of my eyebrows pierced. Do you think I would still have a job? Do you think I would deserve to still have a job?

What this girl is counting on is Americans unthinking respect for all things religious. If she just wanted to wear a headscarf because she was a hipster and it seemed super ironic, we wouldn’t respect that. But because it’s part of her religion, our first inclination is to shut up and respect it just because it came attached with the religion word.

For me personally, I think most dress codes are ridiculous. If I own a business some day, you’d better believe I’ll have shaggy hair and a pair of jeans. I’d seek out the most qualified employees, headscarved, ear-gauged, facial tattooed and otherwise. But that’s my position. Disney is a business, too, and has the right to establish contracts with its employees that mandate certain conditions for their continued employment. If that means no hijabs or hijabs only with funny hats on top, that’s their right. I’m not angry at this girl because she’s Muslim. I’m angry at this girl because she’s an idiot who wants to use government force to exact her goals on a private employer.

I think these two stories speak to the internal diversity of the American Muslim community. Many Muslims are fiercely trying to avoid controversy with the Park 51 situation and fit in here even as their neighbors get more bigoted, but then there are others who, like members of any other religious group, want to take advantage of our tolerance. Here’s hoping the anti-Muslim bigotry and tolerance-manipulation in America both fizzle out.